Reflected Memories
by thesilversun
Summary: Adam reflects on how he's changed Torchwood and how Torchwood has changed him. Spoilers for series 2 episode Adam. Written for a fic challenge. Canon pairings mentioned.


Title: Reflected Memories.  
Warnings: None/that wasn't already in the episode.

Spoilers: Series 2 episode Adam.  
Pairing/s: Canon pairings mentioned.  
Rating: PG  
Summary: Adam reflects on how he's changed Torchwood and how Torchwood has changed him.  
Authors Note: Written for a fic challenge. Torchwood team from the view point of an alien. Five of the seven colours of the rainbow and 800 words or less.

* * *

I had drifted through the Rift for so long, formless and unaging, caught on the currents of time. I was nothing more than a collection of dreams and memories that may or may not have been my own, when I met him.

Jack. The man with a name that is no more his own than the one I take for myself: Adam. He was so full of life and memories that I couldn't help but be drawn to him; he was a beacon in the otherwise dark and alien city in which I'd found myself.

So I took form, an amalgam of the faces around me, and approached him. I could sense something about him, an otherness that set him apart, a kindred spirit; he was as lost and displaced in this world as I.

It was easy to add myself to Jack's memories, there were so many of them, and all I needed was a small place in the last few years. I took nothing he would miss, just nightmarish visions soaked red in blood and pain.

At that moment I was caught. I'd gained life, immortality even, as I knew that I would survive as long as Jack remembered me. That I had to take some of the darkness inside him had seemed such a small price to pay.

Just being in Jack's mind was intoxicating. Whether it was the heat of a yellow alien sun, the dark indigo of deep space, or a mysterious blue box that defied understanding, the memories were all so fresh and vivid that I could believe that I had been there with him.

It was easy to get him to take me back to the Hub, to introduce me to his team. After all by that point Jack thought I already was.

It was there that I met Toshiko. My brilliant, beautiful Toshiko, who's confidence had been so badly damaged, first at school, bullied for her intelligence and later blackmailed as an adult for the that same brilliance. So I took those memories from her and let her become the self-assured woman that I knew she was inside.

Perhaps it was wrong that I gave her memories of us as lovers, but I had done so much for Torchwood, and I couldn't help but feel that I deserved something in return. I'd taken as many of Jack's nightmares into my mind as I could stand. I'd dulled Ianto's grief and guilt over surviving situations where he believed that he had no right to have done. And I'd removed Owen's memories of an unloved childhood, so that for the first time in his life he'd actually been satisfied with it.

Yes what I did changed them, but they were hardly unhappy for it. We were all winners in this, I told myself. The human ability, gained from their minds, to justify almost anything in the name of the greater good is more liberating than anything else I'd known.

Gwen forgetting about Rhys had been an accident, and I knew that I'd become arrogant in my abilities. I also knew that there was no way I could stop, not now, I couldn't lose this near perfect life that I'd made for all of us. They'd become like family to me, and all I needed was a little more time to make things right.

That it was Ianto who betrayed me, threatened to destroy all that I am and all that I've done for them, surprised me. Although I suppose it shouldn't have been given what I'd seen in Jack's memories: a capacity for deception that near rivals my own.

He was going to ruin everything. So I barely spared it a second thought as I pressed my hand to his forehead, feeling his fear and revelling in it. The vicious satisfaction in knowing that after this I would have his loyalty, seemed to spur me on.

It was only afterwards that I wondered what I had become. Because I knew that once I wouldn't have done this, that back in the days before I came to this primitive little green planet and met Jack and flawed, vibrant team, with all their memories of darkness and unspoken lusts, such an act would have abhorred me.

Then the thought was lost, cast out and replaced by the certainty that they'd made me what I am as surely as I'd made them, and I would never give them up.


End file.
